Friday, 30 April 2010

It's 65 years since Hitler drafted his will before committing suicide. The men who translated it were renegade Germans who fled to Britain to take up arms against their own country. Two new memoirs shed light on this little-known group.

The outbreak of World War II saw thousands of people across Europe volunteer for military service, in a bid to do their duty for their respective countries.
But among those who stepped forward for Britain were 10,000 German and Austrian nationals, who had fled the Nazis and were willing to fight against their own countrymen. Known as "the King's most loyal enemy aliens" many, but not all, were Jewish.

FIND OUT MORE

Mario Cacciottolo examines Mr Rothman and Mr Anson's stories in more detail on Breakfast on BBC One from 06:00 to 10:00 BST, Saturday 1 May.

Among them was Herman Rothman, a Jew born in Berlin. He came to England aged 14 on the Kindertransport, fleeing Nazi persecution shortly before war broke out in 1939.
In October 1945, Mr Rothman and a handful of other German Jews were given a top-secret task - to translate the political and personal wills of Adolf Hitler. He had written them on 29 April earlier that year, then committed suicide, probably on 30 April - the exact date remains uncertain.
Now 85 and living in Ilford, Essex, Mr Rothman has written a book called Hitler's Will about his military service. He became a British citizen in 1947, meaning he fought for Britain while still a German.
"I wanted to do my very best for the British war effort," he says in a voice still enriched by a German accent. Temper
"There was no question in my mind that the Hitler regime would exterminate people who were opposed to it, and I wanted to do my very best to see that regime finished as quickly as possible. All of those who escaped from Germany felt the same."
Allowed to enlist in May 1944, he ended up working in the 3rd Counter-Intelligence Section for the British army, his fluency in German proving a vital skill. As a soldier he was known as Harry Rothman.
It was while working in Fallingbostel internment camp in Germany that Mr Rothman was woken up early by his commanding officer, who urgently requested his presence. He was one of several renegade Germans.

The German who fought for Britain

They were told how a man had been arrested and papers were found sewn into his coat's shoulders. He'd been spotted by a suspicious soldier who had worked in a West End department store and had noticed the coat was oddly shaped.
These documents, typed in German on parchment, were quickly identified by Mr Rothman and his colleagues as Hitler's personal and political wills, along with Joseph Goebbels's addendum.
Three copies of the documents had been made by Hitler. Two of them were later acquired by the Imperial War Museum in London, these included the actual documents handled by Mr Rothman - who was given Goebbels's words to translate.
"Goebbels wrote in very long sentences that I had to punctuate in order to make sense of them," says Mr Rothman. "Hitler's wills weren't on ordinary paper, but on parchment. The letters were typed in capitals. 'Scum of the earth'
"The will had his signature on it in other ways. Nobody writes a letter on parchment. I got the feeling that, with this last act, he wanted to impress the German people."
Only on one occasion did Mr Rothman lose his temper with his countrymen, when some imprisoned Nazi officers complained to him about a lack of food.

"I said to them - who is to blame, ultimately, for the food shortage? Can anybody be blamed but yourselves? You instrumented the war and now you come to me and complain you haven't got any food? You are abschaum der menschheit - scum of the earth."
Mr Rothman now says he should not have used that insult, and that it prompted a complaint against him from the prisoners. But he was cleared after a brief inquiry, although he suggests it perhaps "cost him a medal". Still, he says he doesn't regret saying it.
Another German who fought for Britain was Claus Leopold Octavio Ascher, born in Berlin in 1922, who later became Colin Edward Anson.
He fled Germany days before his 17th birthday, his family being fearful for his safety. His father Curt, an outspoken opponent of Hitler's, was arrested in September 1937 and taken to Dachau concentration camp. He died a month later. Identity change
Although Curt was Jewish, Mr Anson's mother was Protestant and he was raised in the latter faith.
Arriving in Britain in February 1939 with little command of the English language, Mr Anson volunteered to fight for Britain after the outbreak of war, joining the Pioneer Corps.
"I felt, like many refugees, that it was very much my own business and that I couldn't stand by and let other people sort it out."

Hitler made his wills and died some two months after this image was taken

Now aged 88 and living in Hertfordshire, Mr Anson has written a memoir called German Schoolboy, British Commando. He says he received "friendly interest and compassionate understanding" from Britons who detected his Germanic origins.
"I've never had any hostile or unpleasant reactions. Never. They were quite aware that refugees from Nazi Germany were opposed to the Nazis."
In 1942, when alien nationals were allowed to transfer to other units from the Pioneer Corps, Colin was accepted into 3 Troop Commando, consisting solely of German-speaking refugees who underwent intensive and specialist training.
These foreign soldiers were also advised on personal security issues, given their backgrounds. They were told to make up cover stories in case they were ever captured to account for their accents - that they had spent time in Germany as children, for example. Brain exposed
They were also told to change their names to more English versions, with the same initials as their Germanic names, to help them remember these new identities.
Colin chose his new surname because, at the very moment he was asked to make one up, an Anson communications plane flew overhead.

Herman Rothman fled to the UK when he was 14

After completing his training, Colin was attached to another commando unit and took part in the invasion of Sicily, where he suffered a head wound so severe it left part of his brain exposed and he was not expected to survive.
But he did eventually recover, serving the British again on commando raids in Yugoslavia, Albania, and then in the liberation of Corfu. His language skills became invaluable as increasing numbers of German POWs were captured.
Did he have any qualms about fighting fellow Germans?
"I can't say I gave it much thought. When we were in action against enemy forces something in a grey uniform was a target to shoot at.
"It was only afterwards when you took prisoners - and I much preferred to take prisoners rather than killing people - that the whole question arose.
"Germans I then came into contact with would be perfectly amenable, except when I interrogated people and they would start asking me 'why do you speak such good German?'
"I had to remind them that it was I who was asking the questions."
He says he feels no animosity towards Germans who fought for Hitler.
"I can't find it in my heart to be critical of people for having been in the Nazi party at that time. What else should they do under the circumstances? What else should they have done? They were called up and did their duty, as they saw it, for their country. They had very few opportunities for acting otherwise."

A leader describing himself as a "compassionate Conservative" is on the brink of victory.

He has shown his party has changed. He puts his black and Asian supporters out front. He promises to "unleash" the potential "of volunteers to ... change our country". This time, he says, his party "will be different". It is the year 2000, and his name is George W Bush. It's no surprise to discover that George Osborne said in 2002 that "we have much to learn from Bush's compassionate conservatism". They are following the Bush script to the mis-spelled letter.

Most parties offer only scattered clues to the electorate about what they will do when they get power, buried in baskets filled with cotton wool and fluffy bunnies to distract us. Read Thatcher or Bush's pre-election speeches and they're pleasingly fuzzy. You have to infer the big, swooping changes they will make from the small tilts in direction offered in policy documents – and Cameron's small policies are surprisingly revealing.

Revealing Policy One: Today, 1,600 British people are killed every year just doing their job, putting us behind many poorer countries for workplace safety. They are people like Michael Adamson, a 26-year-old electrician who went to his job one day and was given a massive electric shock because his employer hadn't bought a £12 piece of safety equipment.

Yet David Cameron is promising to dismantle the very weak protections currently in place, and replace them with a system where corporations will be able to "organise their own inspections", carried out by a team of their choice. Cameron's people justify this by pointing to made-up stories in the right-wing press claiming health and safety inspectors spend their time stopping children playing conkers. UCATT, the astonished construction workers' union, has been protesting outside Tory HQ, with members dressed as the Grim Reaper. Michael Adamson's sister, Louise, who is a lawyer, says: "Cameron's proposals are outrageously dangerous. They will end with a lot more people dying. It takes the very light touch regulation that gave us Lehman Brothers and Enron, and applies it to workplace safety. This time it's not money you lose, it's lives. This isn't about conkers, it's about people like my brother, who could have been saved for £12." This policy suggests Cameron instinctively puts corporate profits ahead of the the safety of ordinary people – a dangerous habit to act out in Downing Street.

Revealing Policy Two: Today, most serious crime in Britain comes from cross-border criminal gangs – whether it's jihadism, human trafficking, or paedophile rings. Until recently, the police had to rely on a slow, confusing tangle of different agreements with each individual country in Europe when trying to track these criminals – and many hardcore criminals escaped as the police waded through bureaucratic treacle. So Europe's police forces, including Britain's, proposed a single, simple procedure called the European Arrest Warrant: one swift standard for serious crime. It has been a superb success story. It meant we busted some of the worst paedophile rings and jihadi cells in the world, and are now shutting down the Costa Del Crime, where British gangsters fled for decades to Spain beyond the reach of our extradition agreements.

But David Cameron's Conservatives oppose the warrant, calling it "over-reach by Brussels". Of course he wants to catch jihadis and paedophiles; but his hostility to European co-operation trumps that desire. He chooses dogmatic Europhobia over pragmatic British needs – and we should assume he will continue to.

Revealing Policy Three: Most British people now acknowledge that heroin addiction is an illness. Yes, it begins with a bad choice by an individual, but it can rapidly become a ravaging sickness beyond their control. Sadly, even the very best rehab in the world fails for 80 per cent of addicts, who soon relapse. So what do we do with the 250,000 people who can't stop? Over the past two decades Britain has followed Europe in giving these people steady, clean medical prescriptions of the substitute drug methadone. Wherever this policy is introduced, burglary and robbery rates fall dramatically, as addicts stop stealing to feed their addiction. As the former deputy drugs tsar Mike Trace told me: "These prescriptions are the secret reason why crime has fallen so much under the current government."

Iain Duncan Smith has been put in charge of Tory drugs policy by Cameron, and has dismissed this approach as "methadone madness". He says that addicts live an immoral "half-life" and government policy should be to force addicts off substitutes and direct them towards voluntary abstinence groups like Narcotics Anonymous. Doctors and charities who work with addicts are incredulous. Danny Kushlick, of the drug charity Transform, says: "If the Tories acted on their current rhetoric, what would actually happen is clear. If they can't get the drug from the doctor, you'll have hundreds of thousands of addicts getting it on the street. You would see a huge increase in street heroin use, and everything that goes with that – burglary, shoplifting, prostitution, homelessness, and far more HIV and Hepatitis C infections as the level of injecting went up. It would be a public health and crime disaster, in place of sensibly reducing harm." Cameron's policy suggests he prefers finger-wagging moralism to a calm study of consequences.

Revealing Policy Four: Cameron says he is demanding spending cuts not because he has a theological belief in a small state, but because they are necessary to pay off the deficit – but this claim is undermined by the fact that he wants to strip funding from state programmes that actually save us money. Look for example at SureStart, the network of 3,000 children's centres across Britain built under the current government. They are based on a fascinating series of discoveries. It has been proven that most poor children fall behind in language skills and stimulation long before they ever walk through the school gates – and they never catch up. The first few years of life are crucial for the formation of a child's mental abilities. Get them early and give them intensive encouragement, with expert advice for their parents, and you can change their life.

This isn't speculation. In 1964, they launched the first SureStart-style project in Michigan – and Dr Lawrence Schweinhart and a team of academics has been monitoring the kids ever since. Did it work? Well, they were 50 per cent less likely to become teenage mothers than their siblings who weren't put in the programme, and by the time they were 40, they were 46 per cent less likely to have been to prison and 26 per cent less likely to be on welfare. Their incomes were 42 per cent higher. So for every £1 you spend on it, you save the state £7 further down the line. Yet Cameron, on becoming Tory leader, dismissed SureStart as "a microcosm of government failure". Now he says he will keep it in some form, but already he says huge chunks of its budget will go to other things, and few expect it to survive long. If he can't keep the single best policy for reducing inequality – one that costs less than nothing in the medium term – what shreds of progress can survive his rule?

You don't have to scrape off much of the glitter and gloss to get to Cameron's less-than-fluffy Bush. Who really wants this cocktail of market fundamentalism, Europhobia, and haranguing of the vulnerable for the next five years?

What is it with builders and their radios tuned to inane commercial radio stations played really loudly? Drives me fugn insane hearing these songs that have been played to death.There is so much good music being released NOW but you do not get a chance to hear it...Interesting that the average age of the ABC yoof station Triple J listener was recently announced as 34 and even that station just plays guitar based music mostly which is not where the new sounds in music are coming from!

Drexciya: A place. A duo from Detroit. An enigma. Formed in 1991 and recording since 1993, Drexciya announced in 1997 that they would cease producing. But no complaints were raised when 1998 saw two tracks from Drexciya appear on the Interstellar Fugitives full length featuring various members of Detroit's Underground Resistance camp. A rumor started in early 1999 that Drexciya would be making their return later in the year with a full length release. November the news became reality with the release of the Neptune's Lair album on Berlin's respected Tresor imprint; a new six song EP called "Hydro Doorways" was released on the label earlier in February of this year. After remaining silent over the years and doing just 2 or 3 rare interviews, Drexciya came out of the shadows to talk about Neptune's Lair with the German and UK Press. Here in North America, Andrew Duke was given an exclusive opportunity to speak with Drexciya and spread the word on these shores. The music of Drexciya is equal parts electro, techno, and funk. Murky and mysterious, produced by aqua-men who are seen only in paintings, you'll hear references to seminal groups like Parliament, Kraftwerk, Jonzun Crew, and New Order, but the Drexciyan mythology and aquatic atmospheres are unique and truly unlike the sound produced by any other artist. Prepare yourself for immersion; breathe deep, then dive in.

In this special feature, Andrew Duke attempts to get into the mind of Drexciya and learn more about their underwater world, their phantasmagoria of sight and sound, their system, the music industry, love of music versus love of money, and their beginnings. Come now and eavesdrop on a conversation with Drexciya.

What are the ideas, thoughts, and concepts behind Drexciya?"Basically they just come from the inside-the way we feel with the vibes of the music. And whichever way it takes us, that's the direction we go in, so far as the titles and the songs themselves when they're being created. Wherever the current takes us, that's where we're going. Any given time a title could pop up or a song could pop up, there's nothing that's really preplanned. We flow with the current."

Though you say you "flow with the current", the movement, the ebb, is one of your own design. Drexciyan releases follow no set schedule, you've never been captured by a lens, your music has never been remixed, and until now, interviews with Drexciya have been extremely rare. Why is it so important to you to go against the rules in the music industry?"I guess you could say we do it to do something different, to try something different. Sometimes you might have the physical laws and properties saying that you can't do this, or that this is impossible, but hey, why not give it a try again and see what will happen? For instance, the laws and properties of different music styles, the way things are supposed to be arranged, that they're supposed to be like this or that. Well, technically, we have no rules and no instructions on the way music is supposed to be, so that's how we're able to do anything and make it beautiful. It's all about controlling and harnessing the energy."

While some tracks from Drexciya are full songs, sometimes there will be just a short excerpt, often stopping just as it feels like the track is about to kick in. It's as if you're content to offer just a brief look at what you're doing, cloaking the majority from ear shot and eye range."That's right on the money because it's just another view of the world of Drexciya. I guess you could just say it's just where we're at right now-part of the current. You might be going down some rough water this time, next time you might be on some calm, still water, you know. Next time you might hit a whirlpool or something like this, you know, so it depends on which way we're gonna go with it."

In the world of Drexciya, you talk of many places, but you most often talk about a place called Lardossa. Tell me about it."Lardossa is just another city that's on the other side of Drexciya. There's many different cities around there, and as time goes on we'll bring them forth or whatnot. It's a place on the other side of the Red Hills, it's a very calm tranquil place where things are very easy-going, there's not really that hustle and bustle and it's more or less carefree and mellow, like you're in a trance."

What would a Drexciyan concert be like?"Well, that's yet to be seen, but if we were to do a show, it would be a hell of a show and much more than just an appearance with a couple of keyboards. Once we get ready to come out and make our appearance on stage, it's really gonna be a hell of a show, that's the way we want to do it-a full-fledged concert, not just at a party, like at half-time or something like that. When we do our show it's gonna be a concert where you come to see us and you see other people, then afterwards, there might be an after-party or something, but our concert will be done like it's supposed to be."

Would you want to perform underwater?"Yeah-anywhere. In a sewer, underwater, in a swimming pool, in the middle of a swamp, in a back alley somewhere, it doesn't make a difference, we'll appear anywhere, it all depends."

How does water relate to your music and Drexciya?"Well, water is the most powerful element on this planet. Water has many different properties. It comes in many different forms and many different shapes and different weights. And that's the way we see our music--we can come in any different size or shape that we want depending on the rhythm of the song, how aggressive the song is, how transparent or how big it is, how clear, how diluted, how fast, how slow, it all depends-the same properties as water. Water runs fasts, water runs slow, and the best way to put a visual picture in your mind of Drexciya and what we're all about is that we [Drexciya and water] go hand in hand. You have to have all the dimensions, you have to have the visual, the sonic side of things, and you have to have a purpose--a concept--to make it real. So once you bring in the world of Drexciya and the people and how they're living their lives in Drexciya, you know, you put the element of water, which is the basic element of life for anyone-period. Once you factor in all your different things, this is how it is with Drexciya and how the basic principles are."

How does the water itself affect the music? Music under water as opposed to music above water."It's the difference in degree. Sometimes you might be going through some rough rapids, or there's a strong undertow or whatnot. Or, better yet, maybe it's just still, very calm, a very gentle flow. So when you're making music it all depends entirely on which water you're in."

Why is it so important that you don't make it easy for people to understand Drexciya? You could lay it all out on the line, but you don't do that, you hold back."Basically, we want people to tap into their minds and their creativity. It's like 'I'll put this out here for you and I need your help' to where it's like 'damn!' But there's a little more to it, so once you really look at it, and really listen to it, there's more going on inside the music then what you think you're really hearing. It's like going to the record store and dropping the needle [on a record from Drexciya] and listening to it for two seconds. [laughs] You haven't heard all of a Drexciya record until you listen to the whole entire track because there are a lot of things that are going on in there. So basically, you know, we kind of do that intentionally to stimulate their minds and take them deeper into the world of Drexciya. Instead of just laying it out there and making it dull and boring; once you have something that is a mystery, people enjoy that more. For example, picture what you think when you look at a couch and how you might look at things differently, feel things differently, you know. So it's like instead of 'hmmm, that's very simple, it's just a couch sitting over there in the corner', what if things were changed? What if you have some weird transparent liquid chair over there that's moving, then you're gonna want to take a closer look at it and go like 'what the hell is that? Damn! What's over there, a couch?' Then you go and sit down on it and it wraps itself around you and caresses you and it makes you go 'ooooh' and puts little chills down your back, makes the hair raise up on the back of your neck. That's the kind of effect that we're putting into the music, to where it's a 50/50 thing with a little bit of a mystery to it."

You want your music to be like an exercise, a process, as opposed to a final result, so it can be different for everyone, people get back what they put in, a push-pull give-take kind of thing."Right. Oh yeah, action and reaction. I'd rather have something to where it's gonna stimulate you and where it's gonna move you in different ways that have something that is just there and is hum-drum, kind of boring, the same typical thing that you hear every single day."

In your releases, you often mention the Red Hills of Lardossa. What are some of the other places in Drexciya's world?"Well, basically, the main thing that we want to work on is the new lab, Neptune's Lair. Right now we're in the process of doing a lot of experiments and whatnot, so in the forthcoming years you'll be hearing a lot more experiments. That's one thing we want to start doing because it's time now to go back and do some more research on some different kinds of elements and whatnot. One of the things is Polymono Plexusgel; that's the gel that is alive but not alive. The energy that makes it live is from the energy that lives in Drexciya--the magic--and it comes from the Earth. The Polymono Plexusgel and the strands tap themselves right down into the planet. The planet actually gives itself life, can you catch me? If you look at the album [Neptune's Lair], there's a lot of different titles--the different elements that's on there--that go along with these concepts. We're developing a little mystery and the people kind of go along with that and follow it."

You do things on your own terms when you release material as Drexciya as opposed to some artists who might put out material on a more regular basis. In 1997 you dissolved the group and disappeared until you surfaced momentarily with two tracks on Underground Resistance's Interstellar Fugitives release. Why is it important that you took a break from recording and what made you decide to come back now with this album on Berlin's Tresor imprint, Neptune's Lair?"There's no difference between then and now; the only difference is that I feel we need to start picking up the pace. We might still put out some stuff with Mike [Banks's UR label], that's a given. We take breaks to get away from everything and come back fresh. Basically, during that time where we took a break, inspiration, with the way things were going around here, it just wasn't right, you know. But it just came to a point where it was like 'we can't give it up'. We couldn't do that because it's in our blood, it's in our veins, we can't just get out of it, we can't stop doing what we do. So we decided 'hey, we've got to go for it, we've got to do it, we've got to pick up the pace and come back and do what we do best.'"

You make music to make people happy, not because of money or because of ego."Right. Most definitely. And that's the way it should be. Because if you make music for any other purpose, it's not going to come out right. It's not going to feel free, you're not going to be able to create freely like you're supposed to. You'll be making music to survive, you'll be making music for phony reasons. But if you make music because you love it and because it's in your blood, I think you're going to make some of the most beautiful things that anybody has ever heard. Look at Quincy Jones, look at Stevie Wonder; those guys are still making beautiful music. They do it because they love it, they're not doing it because they want the money. I mean look at Prince now. He's still making music and putting it out because he loves it. He could have went out there and got fat record deals from Warner Brothers and whoever else screwed him, could have got millions and millions of dollars, but he doesn't care about that. He wanted to do his thing. If you don't love it, leave it alone."

Do you think there's too much music being released these days?"I really don't know. When I'm in the process of working in the lab, I tend to stay away from everything and don't keep up on that and monitor that."

What do you think about the music that is released for the wrong reasons, where it is released purely to make money and satisfy ego, or to keep up a release schedule? Do you think it is important that that music come out because it shows people a contrast between that and the music that is made with heart, or do you think it would be better if there wasn't "bad" music out there?"You need a balance. I feel like this because this is a very big world and people are gonna do whatever they wanna do. Just like how electronic music comes out in many forms. I'm not gonna blast or criticize rave music no more or anything else because I finally realized as I became older that this is a big planet and there's enough room for everybody. The thing is, as long as we don't step on each others' toes and try to push each other down, then it shouldn't be a problem, shouldn't be a conflict. The only time I have a problem is when people try to step on my toes or try to do something like that. You're going to have some people that have problems and are on an ego trip and that's fine and dandy-that's them. Whatever they do doesn't affect me because I'm going to be responsible for what I do."

What was the catalyst that took you into the world of Drexciya when you began? Was it something like the song "Alleys Of Your Mind" from 1983 from Detroit's Juan Atkins and Rik Davis' Cybotron, or was it something before that? What made you realize that you had to make music?"It started in the 70s, actually, back in the disco era with some of the more underground type disco songs, you know with the really deep heavy bass riffs, and it started picking up in the early 80s when the Cybotron came out. Then there was the whole musical revolution in the 80s, you know, it goes across the whole entire board-from rock to punk to new wave to R & B to funk to techno to hip hop, so the whole music really molded us. At that point [when we started recording] it was like we had no choice but to do this because we were busting at the seams. Like a big ripe grape and you're getting ready to transform into a raisin. You know what I'm saying? Life goes on. We just kept going to the point where we started tinkering around to see what we could do. We started messing around and we realized 'yeah, this is what we should be doing.'"

To finish our conversation, tell me what it's like to ride a manta ray."[laughs] It's fun, it's pretty fun. You're dashing through the water, you know, it's almost like a dolphin, but a little bit slower at times."@'Cognition Audioworks'

Thursday, 29 April 2010

A couple of days after Australian PM Rudd delayed the Carbon Trading Scheme he announced today that the price of a packet of cigarettes will rise by 25% at midnight tonight...does he think this will make every one of us smokers give up and therefore there will be less emissions?

He also announced a delay in the implementation of the internet filter (that at least is a good thing.)

I do not know where to begin with Rudd...

Firstly though he needs a speechwriter...he is the most appalling public speaker it has ever been my misfortune to hear.(Thanx to Leisa for the pic!)

A brave sheriff is in town and he has a tough decision to make. Uphold the new law (SB 1070) in Arizona and ask his deputies to perform racial profiling, which will lead to lawsuits, or he can choose not to enforce the law, which will lead to lawsuits too. In the end, it's the attorneys who will come out the winners.

David Toop is the author of several landmark books about music, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), and Haunted Weather (2004). He is also a musician, with a discography spanning nearly four decades. His first record – a collaboration with the sound sculptor Max Eastley titled New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments -- was released in 1975 on Brian Eno's Obscure label.

In Toop's previous books Ocean of Sound and Haunted Weather, he explored sound in all its ephemeral, enigmatic, amorphous connotations. His new book Sinister Resonance, out soon on Continuum, takes those explorations a step further, drawing a dense web of connections between sound and visual art. Toop begins the book with the concept that “sound is a haunting, a ghost, a presence whose location in space is ambiguous and whose existence in time is transitory.” To explore sound’s intangibility and mystery, Toop wanders through a bewildering array of references from fiction, myth, painting, and architecture, allowing him to approach sound in oblique and unexpected ways.

Let's talk about Sinister Resonance. What drove you to write this book?

I was thinking about the senses a lot and I was thinking about the repositioning of the senses, and the focus on seeing and looking and touching in our culture, and I thought about John Berger's book Ways of Seeing. Obviously, there’s no auditory equivalent to Ways of Seeing; there’s no Ways of Hearing. I contemplated writing a book called Ways of Hearing, which this book is and it isn’t.

Cover of John Berger's Ways of Seeing

In the process of doing that, I was re-reading his book. I began to think about what he said about his prioritization of seeing as the way we locate ourselves in the world. And what he said about the silence of Vermeer. It reawakened something in me. My background is partly in music and it was partly in visual arts. I dropped out of two art schools, in fact. I studied graphic design and painting. Then I dropped out and really went with music at that point. And I think that music and my concentration on sound has really taken over, in that 35-year period I'm talking about.

I started to look again at visual art. And that’s my attempt at it. I had a revelation; I was in the Wallace Collection and I saw this painting by Nicolas Maes, The Listening Housewife (The Eavesdropper), and it really struck me because it was a representation of a moment of listening. And that’s quite unusual. I researched this painting and I discovered that he painted a whole series of these eavesdropper images when he was a very young man. And that was a starting point for me of a whole train of thought, in which I really began to think about a history of listening, and how silent media represent the history of listening. Before the advent of audio recording in the late 19th century, all we have in terms of a memory of listening experiences, auditory experiences, is what is preserved through silent media – whether it's notation and writing or painting and sculpture. And to some extent in musical instruments. And auditory technology – basically, we glean some sense of auditory history from silent media. It really began to fascinate me. On one hand, it leads into a deeper exploration of the difference between the senses, and the overlapping between the senses and what’s actually going on with listening, and on the other hand it leads deeper into an exploration of incidents of listening.

I think that the point is – and this is the main thread of the book, if you like – that sound has this characteristic of the uncanny, that sound is to some degree a ghost, and hence this expression in the mediumship of the listener. Sound is transitory, ambiguous in its location in space, and it’s uncertain; it lends itself to representations of uncertainty. It lends itself to feelings of dread and fear and loss and these emotional states, these extreme psychic states. It lends itself to mysticism, all these ineffable experiences. These sensations of immateriality. And so it’s a very powerful tool for musicians, but at a certain level, in social functioning or whatever, it’s perceived as being unreliable.

The way we describe reality is always through seeing and touch; seeing is believing. So listening has this negative quality, which is of course tremendously interesting. It can always have this sense of the uncanny. You can never be quite sure of what somebody has said to you. You can never be quite sure of the source of a sound, particularly when the source of the sound is hidden from you, which is often the case. We make suppositions all the time about what we hear. For that reason, sound is very important in, for example, supernatural fiction. One section of the book is focused on ghost stories and horror stories particularly from the 19th century beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, going through to all these late 19th century and early 20th century writers like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood and Wilkie Collins, and onto 20th century writers like Shirley Jackson. Sound is often a kind of portent; it’s a sign that something bad is about to happen. Very often there’s a silence, and then there's a strange sound and the bad stuff begins. It’s almost like sound is the presence of a ghost, because sound has the quality of a ghost. You know, that the sensory quality of the uncanny is mentioned by Freud in his famous essay on the uncanny. He doesn’t elaborate on sound; he just makes the point that we have these deep childhood fears. In that sense for me, the book is personal. I went back to my first memories of sound, and they tended to be very fearful. Things that go bump in the night. These hyper-acute experiences of listening – which I tend to think of as paranoid listening – in a way you’re eavesdropping on what isn’t there. It’s manufactured in the imagination but it becomes very real, in an experience of terror.

You talk a lot in your book about the connections between painting and sound. You have some very interesting ideas about hearing the sounds in paintings. Even old chestnuts like Edvard Munch’s The Scream seem strange and new, using this analysis. You quote Munch, who seemed haunted by his own work, and the sounds beneath it: “I felt a huge scream welling up inside me--and I really did hear a huge scream...The lines and colors quivered in movement.”

It’s definitely a new approach and I tried to talk to a few art historians about it, and they kind of avoided it...I think it’s very risky territory for them. For one thing, they’re not really interested. But it’s very subjective; this is kind of my fantasy, you could argue. There’s a painting, it’s not making any sound, it’s completely silent, so what is he talking about? But at the same time, if you follow my logic, I think that there are many paintings where you can hear sound, and many paintings in which you can’t. That to me is an indication that the artist was in some way, consciously or unconsciously, interested in sound as an element of the work. I can’t prove that. The Scream is a good example, because as you say, it’s become a kind of cliché, wallpaper, in our thinking. But if you go to Munch’s ideas – the things he was thinking about and interested in when he did that painting -- he was interested in new science at the time, these theories of vibration and so on. He was experiencing these hyper-acute sensations in which sound impacted him very forcefully. He was experiencing this kind of bleed between the senses, almost. The senses were very integrated for him. They overflowed. If you go back to his ideas and what he was really interested in when he was doing that painting, it brings his paintings back to life again, that's one thing. But it really does give me some evidential basis for making this preposterous claim that certain paintings make sound. To me, it’s quite obvious in many paintings. And that’s because this is my area; this is what I'm sensitive to. And I come back to something that I was very, very interested in, [which] to some extent I had training in when I was very young. I come back to it through these 40 years of focusing very intently on sound and listening and music. And so that informs my perspective, my reading of these paintings. It’s my belief that sound is the silent part of the impact of many paintings. I also believe that sound is used to articulate ideas within certain paintings.

Tell me about your own experiences as a student in art school. I know that you were an art school student in Britain in the 1960s.

We used to do foundation here, and the teaching at that time – I'm talking 1967, 1968 – was based on a very intensive kind of looking. This all stems from one particular educator in Britain called Harry Thubron, who had this idea of looking; you would draw the spaces in between radiators and things like that. It was an exercise in looking, in seeing, in depth. So I did that for a year; then I did graphic design. I went to Hornsey College of Art, one of the main colleges that had a student sit-in because of the events of Paris '68. So there was a lot of revolutionary fervor at that time, and I got very involved in that and forgot about studies, and it had a huge impact on my life. In my first year of college, just before I left school, I was involved in a sit-in, a takeover of college, and it was incredibly exciting. I did a graphic design course, which I found quite boring. I left that after a year; I went to a painting course. I wanted to work with multimedia, I wanted to work with sound and light projections and so on; this was in 1969, 1970. And they said 'We can’t really help you,' so I walked out. And I was playing music with people by that time anyway. I’ve been playing music since when I was a young teenager, but I was starting to play music seriously at that time -- it was just more exciting, you know? I was very impulsive in those days, very reckless. I just walked out and became a musician.

Talk a little bit about silence. That's another one of those slippery subjects that you assess in your book. There's this one interesting part of your book where you talk to a deaf woman who is very angry with John Cage, because Cage didn't take deaf people into consideration in his ideas about silence. In Sinister Resonance, you talk a lot about silence.

It’s the complexity of silence, isn’t it. We have this orthodoxy now that stems partly from Cage. I suppose mostly from Cage – though as I point out in my book, other people like Virginia Woolf had explored these ideas before Cage had come to them. But we have this orthodoxy that there's no such thing as silence. In one sense I think that’s right; silence is just a word for many states, which are complex states, of noise in fact. Low-level noise. But then on the other hand we have the importance of silence as a metaphor – for example, silence used in talking about the Holocaust or genocide, or environmental destruction and so on. In that sense, silence is a very powerful metaphor. I don’t think we should lose that in this finessing of the real experience of listening to silence, but they’re different modalities in a way. Again, going back to these early modernists, the way Beckett wrote about silence, or Faulkner, or Virginia Woolf – silence could continually change in relation to beings and relation to context. So there was no such thing as absolute silence. It was this very complex property that shifted according to situation and according to the approach of the listener.

My feeling about silence is that the closer you focus down on it, to use a visual metaphor, the more you discover. There’s this paradox – the deeper you get into silence, the noisier it becomes. I was fascinated by these scenes of silence, which were so important to painters. Particularly from the 16th century on, I suppose, and many examples in 17th century painting. All these paintings in Dutch painting from Rembrandt and through to Vermeer, these paintings of people sleeping or reading. The fascination of that simple situation – that ordinary situation of life – somebody sleeping. But what does it mean? How do we engage with that? And some of our engagement is of course auditory. And again it comes back to this theme. There's a narrowing, isn't there, there's the idea that the visual aspect of the scene is what’s truly important, is what’s central. Truthfully our engagement is a much more complex, interlinked engagement. If we're with a person who's sleeping, we're hearing and seeing simultaneously. You can't really separate them out.

Johannes Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, 1663-1664

In your book you also talk about Malevich's Black Square in relation to silence.

Yeah, I do. In later paintings, there’s almost this line. You go through Rembrandt and Vermeer, you come to this point which Ad Reinhardt described as an endpoint. It wasn't an endpoint, but in another sense it was. It was the end of a stage of Western art, this very interesting point, where Cage composed 4’33’’ and Rauschenberg painted white paintings and Ad Reinhardt was painting these so-called black paintings and Rothko was making black paintings and Nam June Paik made his blank leader film. It was like, bringing this down to nothingness. Where do you go from there?

Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1913

In a sense, that has been our dilemma ever since -- for the artists, or for musicians, and the audience. Where do you go from there? Do you go backwards? Do you go back to 19th century romantic music, or do you go back into figurative painting, or do you go into pure philosophy? Where do you go after that? It created this colossal dilemma, and you could characterize that as a kind of silence. What was interesting to me was you do find examples of people making a direct link between monochrome paintings and silence. But that for me raises a difficulty. Is it possible to say that all these monochrome paintings, from Malevich to Rauschenberg at the white end of the spectrum through Brice Marden and Yves Klein and so on to Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella at the other end – are they all silent? How can that be? They’re all completely different. They go through the extremes of the spectrum. For me it doesn't quite work. But it’s an interesting idea, this sense of nothingness, the void. And nothingness, the void, is really where you begin as a composer, a musician, or as a listener.

With Yves Klein and his investigations of the perfect color of blue, you talk about the idea of a single, ringing note.

His symphony was a block of one note, and then a block of silence. So it’s like he’s saying, it was both. It could be both. That was the paradox. I think you could read monochrome painting in the same way. With Ad Reinhardt – it's wrong to talk about Ad Reinhardt's paintings as being black paintings, because they're not; there's a very defined geometric structure within those paintings – are they noise, or are they silence? Its something Reinhardt thought about. It's a reductionism and it's a maximalism, simultaneously.

Yves Klein, IKB 191, 1962

Your books have a sprawling, stream of consciousness style to them, but they're also very coherent. One of the interesting things about this book is that you return to a lot of themes again and again. Woolf, Duchamp, Beckett – they all become characters in your book, in a way. You keep going back to Beckett; you keep going back to Woolf. They keep surfacing.

All of my books since Rap Attack were constructed with a kind of musical form. This idea of revisiting thematic material and weaving it through, with this long duration, so that people have these gentle reminders. That’s the kind of musical sensibility, I think; it’s conscious and it’s unconscious. I do it instinctively, but I also know what I'm doing. It’s about craft as much as anything, but it’s also about the experience of doing an awful lot of this kind of writing, for decades, and also playing music in this kind of way for more than 40 years. It’s part of the experience. I think if you approach writing a book in a more formal way, it’s a very different sense of form. What I do is much more instinctive. There’s a lot of experience both in writing, and in music. It is a way of writing that you may like or dislike or may find illuminating or frustrating, but it’s a way I have that expresses the way my mind works. It’s constantly branching off in different directions. It’s more like plant growth, really. I'm trying to be true to the way I think, but I want to communicate that. I don’t want to be hermetic. I want to communicate with other people who think differently from me. I suspect a lot of people think somewhat in that way, and then it’s tidied up for consumption, regularized. But the idea of the informal is very important to me. And of course it’s influenced by other media; it’s influenced to some extent by film, by new media, by digital media, by cut and paste, by collage, in visual art and music, of course. Conscious influences, over the years, but ultimately at heart it’s the way my mind works. Or not even the way my mind works – just the way I feel in the way I engage with the world.

Geeta Dayal is the author of Another Green World (Continuum, 2009), a new book on Brian Eno. She has written over 150 articles and reviews for major publications, including Bookforum, The Village Voice, The New York Times, The International Herald-Tribune, Wired, The Wire, Print, I.D., and many more. She has taught several courses as a lecturer in new media and journalism at the University of California - Berkeley, Fordham University, and the State University of New York. She studied cognitive neuroscience and film at M.I.T. and journalism at Columbia. You can find more of her work on her blog, The Original Soundtrack.

Max Eastley (Toop's collaborator) was at my band's first gig and got us our second at Lanchester Poly where he was teaching at the time. There was something highly ironic about being sent to Coventry after out first gig!

A Congolese man is trying to get a controversial Tintin book banned in the cartoon star's home country of Belgium.

A court is due to rule later on whether Tintin in the Congo can be sold in Belgian shops and, if it can be, if it must display a warning it is racist. It has already attracted much criticism for its crude racial stereotypes.Three years ago the UK's Commission for Racial Equality called for the book to be banned, saying it contained imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice. Written in the late 1920s it was the second Tintin adventure created by Herge, who later said it was a youthful sin which reflected the prejudices of the time. Now UK editions are generally found alongside more adult books and are sold with a band of paper around the outside, warning the content is offensive. Now Bienvenue Mbutu, a Congolese national living in Belgium, is asking the Belgian courts to ban the book, although he says he would be satisfied if it was sold with a warning like the one used in Britain.Dominic Hughes @'BBC'

Well I worked out why the photos weren't uploading.Blogger has changed the uploading process in 'blogger-draft' to link up with Picasa...meaning that instead of downloading a photo to your desktop and uploading from there you now have to save it into Picasa first and then there are issues with resizing and positioning the photo at your post...bugger that. So I have resorted back to the old blogger, which isn't perfect either.Why do all these companies like Blogger or Facebook keep trying to fix things that ain't broken?As for the spam issue that seems to have been resolved too (hopefully) but I still have a shitload of stuff to do in my real life so there won't be much more from me today...XXX

It looks like someone has reported 'Exile' as a spam blog which is ridiculous and also at the moment I can't upload pics from my computer...they say it should be resolved in 24 hours so I think I will give it a miss until then!

In 1997, the crew of a Japanese fishing boat was pulled from the Sea of Japan after clinging to the boat's wreckage for several hours. They were immediately arrested, however, after authorities interrogated them about the boat's fate. To a man, they claimed a cow had fallen from the sky, apparently coming from nowhere, and struck the boat amidships, resulting in a huge hole and its rapid sinking.

The crew remained in prison for several weeks until Japanese authorities were contacted by several highly embarrassed Russian air force officials. It turned out that the crew of a Russian cargo plane had stolen a cow that wandered near their Siberian airfield and forced it onto their plane before they took off for a flight home. Once airborne, the cow apparently panicked and starting rampaging through the cargo hold, causing the crew also to panic because it was affecting the plane's stability. They solved the problem by shoving the cow out of the hold while crossing the Sea of Japan at 30,000 feet.
Unfortunately, following Rules 5 (Look-out), and 7 (Risk of collision) won't keep you out of trouble when the danger is airborne!

It is perhaps ironic that when Sigmund Freud – who lived by the psychoanalytic theory that sexual desire was the prime motivator for human beings – found out his young protégé, Carl Jung, was having an extra-marital affair with a pretty patient at a mental hospital, he was damning of it.

It was at the turn of the 20th century when the father of psychoanalysis discovered Jung – a married young doctor – was embroiled in an improper sexual liaison with Sabina Spielrein, a 22-year-old Russian who was first admitted as a patient to the Swiss hospital at which Jung worked, and later became one of his most brilliant students, and committed lover.

The revelation caused a schism in the men's friendship that would deepen into personal and professional estrangement in years to come when Jung announced a departure from Freudian psychoanalytic thought and launched his own school of analysis based on dream theory, the collective unconscious and spirituality.

Spielrein's highly charged presence in their lives is now to set the scene for a new film, A Dangerous Method, by the acclaimed director, David Cronenberg, in which Keira Knightley will play the role of Jung's lover, the unsung heroine of psychoanalysis whose own brilliant theories – in spite of her mental fragility – influenced both Freud's and Jung's ground-breaking works.

The director, who is known for his edgy, stylised treatment of stories such as his film adaptation of William S Burroughs' book Naked Lunch, is preparing for a radical interpretation of the fractious triangular friendship. It is being billed as a "dark tale of sexual and intellectual discovery drawn from true-life events". Cronenberg, who first had the idea four years ago, said he had "long been drawn to the story of erotic daring between these two good doctors and the woman who both divided and defined them".

The film will star Michael Fassbender as Jung, and Viggo Mortensen as Freud, who at the time was grappling with many of the neuroses on which he wrote so extensively. A decade earlier, Freud had begun experiencing numerous psychosomatic disorders and exaggerated fears of dying.

The screenplay is to be written by Christopher Hampton, and based on his 2002 stage play, The Talking Cure. Hampton described it as a "true story of the obsessive love affair which played so fateful a role in the pioneering days of psychoanalysis". Shooting will begin next month in Vienna and Lake Constance, and it is due to be in cinemas from next spring.

Jeremy Thomas, the film's producer, said while Spielrein may now be largely forgotten internationally, she was still a "much admired and important figure in Russia today". He said: "In this film, she will be presented as a rather brilliant character, not a victim at all, but a winner. I'm very excited as the film will make psychoanalysis more accessible. It is not usually a topic for popular culture but it is a very important school of thought from the 20th century."

The drama will offer a 10-year snapshot of their friendship triangle, starting from Spielrein's entry to the asylum. Born 1885 to a family of a Jewish doctors in Rostov, Spielrein was admitted to the Burghölzli mental hospital near Zürich, in August 1904, where Jung, who had wed two years previously, worked. She remained there for almost a year and established a deep emotional relationship with Jung who was later her medical dissertation advisor.

A fellow psychoanalyst discovered Jung's breach of professional ethics and he was promptly dismissed from the Burghölzli. Spielrein was later discharged as a patient, wrote a dissertation about schizophrenia, and was elected a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. She continued to work with Jung until 1912 and met Freud in Vienna, before returning to Soviet Russia to get married.

The intense friendship between Freud and Jung began around the same time as the affair when Jung, then 30, sent his "Studies in Word Association" to Freud, then 50, in Vienna. The first conversation between them is reported to have lasted more than 13 hours.

Six months later in 1905, Freud sent a collection of his latest published essays to Jung in Zürich, which marked the beginning of an intense correspondence and collaboration that lasted six years. But growing intellectual differences saw Jung resign as the chairman of the International Psychoanalytical Association, to which he had been elected with Freud's support, in May 1910.

The early books of Carl Jung contain theories that chime with Freud's, but by 1912 he had published a theory about the psychology of the unconscious, from which it became clear that his thoughts were taking a different direction from Freudian psychoanalysis, which he called "analytical psychology".

While Spielrein is not often given more than a footnote in the history of the development of psychoanalysis, her conception of the sex drive as containing both an instinct of destruction and an instinct of transformation, which she presented to the Society in 1912, anticipated both Freud's "death wish" and Jung's views on "transformation". She may thus, it is believed by some, have inspired both men's most creative ideas. When Jung had first met Spielrein, he was a fledgling psychiatrist who was very much under the influence of the older, wiser Freud's pioneering theories of psychoanalysis.

While Freud was said to have been censorious about Jung's affair, the latter was also meddlesome in his friend's love life. He is believed to have spread the rumour of a romantic relationship between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment in 1896. Their names appeared in a Swiss hotel log, dated 13 August 1898. Some Freudian scholars regard this as a factual basis for those rumours.

Theories of the mind

Sigmund Freud

The Jewish-Austrian neurologist who founded the psychoanalytic method of psychiatry. Freud is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and for creating the clinical practice of psychoanalysis through dialogue between a patient. Freud is also renowned for his redefinition of sexual desire as the primary motivational energy of human life, although he once famously remarked: 'The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"' While some of Freud's ideas have fallen out of favour or been modified, he is considered one of the most prominent thinkers of the first half of the 20th century and still has many devotees.

Carl Gustav Jung

The Swiss psychiatrist was the founder of analytical psychology (also known as Jungian psychology). He has become known as a pioneer in the field of dream analysis. Although he was a practising clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring Eastern philosophy, alchemy and astrology. In 1906, he published Studies in Word Association and later sent a copy of this book to Freud, and a close friendship followed for some six years. In 1912, Jung published Psychology of the Unconscious, resulting in a theoretical divergence from Freud and consequently a break in their friendship, with both stating that the other was unable to admit he could possibly be wrong. The experience is likely to have been welcomed by Jung, as he once said: 'Thing that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves.' He also belieced that 'the meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.'